One Party Stands to Benefit from Scalia Fight: China’s

The flag in front of the U.S. Supreme Court flies at half staff to honor of the late Justice Antonin Scalia February 17, 2016 in Washington, D.C.

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Democrats and Republicans both may dread the impending steel cage match in Washington over who will succeed recently deceased U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but at least one group is embracing the carnage to come: China’s propaganda officials.

On the heels of President Barack Obama’s vow to challenge Republican plans to delay confirming a successor for Mr. Scalia until a new president is elected, two Communist Party-controlled newspapers in China are taking up the conflict as evidence of the U.S.’s inability to live up to its ideals.

“All rules are made by men, and at any given time political influences can take over,” the nationalist tabloid Global Times said in an editorial on Wednesday (in Chinese). “The fight over Scalia’s replacement shows that even the U.S., this model of ‘judicial independence,’ is no exception.”

The Communist Party flagship newspaper People’s Daily, which publishes the Global Times, likewise took a swipe at the U.S.’s independent judiciary in an analysis of the fallout from Mr. Scalia’s death. “In practice it’s utterly impossible for this so-called judicial independence to break free of the influence of party politics,” it said (in Chinese).

The polarization of U.S. politics is a popular topic in Chinese media, which occasionally marvel over the glacial pace at which U.S. lawmakers seem to pass laws. Echoing Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the Global Times on Wednesday argued that U.S. elites benefited from the country’s gridlocked political system and weren’t motivated to consider changing it.

“Even if they reflect on it, they do so fleetingly, like dragonflies skipping across the water,” the newspaper said.

But the pointed attacks in both newspapers on the notion of judicial independence suggested there was more to the pieces than a desire to poke fun at Washington’s political failings.

Under President Xi Jinping, Communist Party officials have been tasked with reforming China’s traditionally weak legal system. Their goal, outlined in a raft of legal reform documents, is to create courts that are independent enough to be accepted as legitimate but not so independent they can challenge the Communist Party’s ultimate authority.

In selling “socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics,” as the system is known in party writings, official media have portrayed the rule of law practiced in Western countries as unsuitable for China. In their Wednesday pieces, both People’s Daily and Global Times took the sales pitch further, depicting the U.S.’s highest court as a political battlefield incapable of delivering independent judgments.

“These past few years, the U.S. Supreme Court has more and more been dragged into the workings of daily politics,” the newspaper quoted Da Wei, an expert in American politics at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, as saying.

Neither newspaper delved deeply into the history of Supreme Court nomination battles or into the mechanisms that shield Supreme Court justices from political influence once they are nominated. The Global Times seemed to nod at the omission, saying it was possible to argue the Supreme Court still enjoys independence, “but in that case you’d have to expend a lot of breath further defining what ‘judicial independence’ means.”

In a point that might have pleased Mr. Scalia — an “originalist” who believed the Constitution should be interpreted according to the original intent of the text — People’s Daily quoted Mr. Wei as saying the U.S. political system had drifted from its roots.

Where America’s founding fathers intended the three branches of government to check each other in positive ways, he said, now the legislature, executive and courts are all trying to expand their own power. “This has changed the relationship between the three branches into one of negative balancing, sometimes even deliberate obstruction,” he said.